I'm not sure you're familiar with Alathon. The guy is a self-identified White Nationalist.
To be clear:
I don't approve of "accelerationism" in its violent aspects at all (this is just a fancy way of saying "terrorism"), and (((I))) most certainly wouldn't be welcome in a "White Nationalist" ethno-state. Pace Ayn Rand, I consider racialism the worst and lowest form of collectivism. What remains of the "alt-right" are a bunch of losers flailing around incompetently. They're mostly useful as an object lesson in what NOT to do. (Aside: If you haven't read Michael Malice's book on the New Right, you really should. The audio book is even better as he reads it himself and does voice impressions).
I'm probably guilty of going too far into the weeds of the problems on the right, which are germane to your post only in so much as they help explain the current situation vis a vis digital censorship and China. The point I was trying to drive at is that we're witnessing not just an example of some tech companies valuing Chinese money over Western freedom, or the "late stage of capitalism" or whatever, but rather a shift in the currents of social and political power that run through American society.
Pace Burnham, when a new group of potential elites arise the old elites either have to absorb them, or crush them. To some extent, they do both at the same time. Some of the new elites will be absorbed and a few will get left behind. This can be a good thing, in that it prevents the society from fracturing and provides fresh blood to an elite grown stale and out of touch. It can also be a bad thing, as the new elite and the old elite further entrench their position above the hoi polloi and the worst traits of both groups come to the fore. I think we're seeing something like that happen before our eyes.
This certainly seems to be true regarding the social media moguls, and I have no doubt these fools believe they will gain the upper hand on China once they sell out our country. They will discover they were quite wrong, but it will be too late to undo the damage.
What tenbones is saying may sounds like hyperbole, but it really isn't. AI and machine learning isn't a stepping stone like "hey we can turn desktops into laptops" or "now the internet has videos". It's an evolutionary leap in technology. It's not any exaggeration to say we've left the Internet Age and entered the Machine Learning Age as a new tech level.
Yeah. An arrogant belief in their own innate genius and ability to outsmart everyone else in the room is a hall-mark technocrat trait. China speaks their language of tech / business in a way that Washington does not. I'm not particularly afraid of AI per se, because I understand that AI is just a list of weighted instructions some hack programmers pieced together. I am, however, worried about what people will do with it or the power they will turn over to an overgrown abacus.
For example, the idea of an AI determined "social credit score" or Yang's guaranteed universal basic income are great examples of technocrat "solutions" to what they perceive as "inefficiencies" in the current systems. They don't understand that what they perceive as "inefficiencies" are what make the current systems in any way livable. They don't worry about downstream irreversible consequences because, hey, we'll just tweak it as we go / "release another patch".
They also think everyone else is a nice polite upper middle class person like they are. They're sheltered from anything like real violence and are in for a rude awakening when the Chinese take off the nice smiling business-man mask and start cracking the whip - if that hasn't started to happen already.